Remembering Tom

The father of my only child died this year. He died in March, the day after my birthday. The same disease that took Lou Gehrig almost 70 years ago had taken my first husband. In those last months before he passed, I believed that the day he died I would write these words. But that day left me empty of words and it has taken me nine months, the same amount of time as it took to grow his daughter inside my body 27 years ago, to finally find the voice to speak of Tom.

I saw him for the last time one year ago, just before Christmas. Although we had been divorced for many years, and by then he had been married to his third wife, Rosaria, longer than he was married to me, our bond remained strong over the years. It is perhaps the making of a child together that sealed the deal for us all those years ago. Or perhaps it was the fact that I lived with him for 8 years and that I had given him the majority of the decade of my twenties. He was sixteen years my senior. He told me what I liked, what I was afraid of, and who I was. And for a very long time, I believed him.

Nonetheless, while we hadn’t stayed in constant contact in the last decade of his life, there remained a friendship and a history, and most importantly, a lovely child who had grown into a beautiful, strong, amazing young woman. Jourdan and I went to see her father on a Friday. We called his oldest daughter, Cristina, to meet us there, but we beat her by about a half an hour. The three of were prepared to say goodbye based on an email I received from Tom’s best friend, telling us it was time. Jourdan and I got there first, and what we found was that Tom seemed hunkered down, determined to stay. His body had all but betrayed him. Six months earlier he could use a laminated card with the alphabet and numbers to spell out sentences to us. Now he could no longer move his arms or wrists. The movement of his fingers was unsteady, and his head had to be supported by braces so that he no longer nodded in agreement or negation at us. Only his eyes moved, yet somehow they told a story of someone not at all ready to go.

There were no decorations in his house, a Southern California tract home that had been purchased in happier times but now seemed ridiculously large for two people, one of whom was actively dying and the other who had already checked out on some level. Rosaria spent as much time as she could working in the hair salon they had built together. She was trying to keep it all together financially, I’m sure, and who am I to judge her for not being able to stand seeing her partner waste away the way Tom had. She made sure he had good care through the VA, and she tried to maintain a positive appearance for the world. She and my daughter’s relationship was never what Tom would have liked for it to be, and they had gone to blows a few months before during Tom’s recent stay in the VA hospital.

This visit we came armed with only our willingness to put that behind us. When we arrived she pulled Jourdan aside to try to either confront her or talk through their disagreement, and I was left alone with Tom. I watched as my daughter and Rosaria talked in the backyard, and from what I could tell it looked like Jourdan had decided to take the high road and make peace. I turned back to Tom. There was a moment of uncomfortable silence, before our eyes met. And then it was just us, Tom and Claudia, as we had been for almost three decades. I told him I was sorry this had happened to him, that I wanted him to know how much his daughter loved him, that her heart had been broken a month before by a breakup, but that she hadn’t wanted to burden him with it and that she needed his support, she needed her dad. His dark brown eye looked worried for her, and he was there, being a parent to our daughter. I told him that she spoke at large 12 step meetings, that she was brilliant and funny and that she reminded me of him all those years ago. I told him I was once again sober. His eyes smiled, and the sliding glass door opened to Jourdan and Rosaria coming back in from the backyard. They had resolved their issue.

Later when Cristina arrived she just looked sheepishly at her father. They had more than a decade of distance between them, and had only forged a reconciliation over the last few months during that same hospital stay in the VA hospital. Jourdan and I had encouraged Cristina to come. When we entered the room, his eyes lit up. He motioned frantically for Jourdan to hand him the laminated card of alphabets and his fingers moved quickly as Jourdan and I articulated what he had to say to his oldest daughter, “I a-m s-o s-o-r-r-y” Cristina broke down, the tears springing from her lovely light brown eyes. They were the words she had waited a decade to hear, and even though her ears heard her sister and I speaking them, they were no less sweet. Her father had been given the gift of making amends for being a shitty dad to his first child. In four words he said he was sorry he left her mother when she was still a baby, that he had been absent for most of her childhood, and that his shame at not supporting her better financially had made him appear not to care for her. He said that he should know his grandson, now twelve years old, and he should have been there for her during her divorce and after when she’d barely been able to support herself. He said he should have cared for her, nurtured her, loved her better.

By Christmas she had accepted his apology, and was left with the emptiness of knowing that apology was the last real interaction she would ever get from him. He had nothing left to give. She sat next to me, determined not to give Rosaria a chance to build even a fraction of what I had with Cristina since the first time I laid eyes on her. I was nineteen when I met Cristina for the first time. She was nine. It was the night before my wedding to her father, and he dropped her at my parents’ house to spend my last night single with my new stepchild. We slept next to each other on the sofa bed in my parent’s TV room. Cristina had long light brown hair. She was timid and sweet, and I loved her instantly. On the day of the wedding she got up early with me. A girlfriend of mine had sent a breakfast service with a handsome waiter who came to my parent’s house to deliver room service. Cristina sat at the table with me, and we at croissants with butter and jam and drank orange juice. After breakfast we walked, holding hands, to the park where the ceremony would be. We talked easily. She told me about her mother, her new little sister. She told me that she was happy her dad was with me.

Over the years we walked together through childhood, adolescence teenage years, and her courtship and wedding to Karlos. We had our challenges, but always there was a bond between Cristina and me. I remember being in the room when her son was born and knowing the pain of each contraction as if it were my own. I loved her from that first moment when she was a little girl meeting her stepmother, and that has never changed. But the years passed and geography and our own personal paths caused us to drift apart.

We came together with the knowledge of Tom’s illness. Jourdan sought her sister out on the Internet, finally found her on MySpace. I let the two of them find a way to one another. We came together after years of losing touch that day at the Veteran’s Hospital.

That day at Tom’s house last year, I saw with his two children. We watched as his male caretaker maneuvered his body, trying to make him more comfortable. The television was on, and he occasionally looked beyond us at whatever was on the screen. Above the TV there was a photo of the two of Tom and Rosaria doing what had brought them together more than a decade before, dancing. While it was a beautiful moment, captured in a happy time, I wondered if it made Tom sad to see the image of his former self. Maybe it gave him peace. I’ll never know. Rosaria tried to be gracious, and I attempted to bridge the Grand Canyon sized gap between her and her two stepchildren—a task that I don’t think I succeeded in.

When I remember Tom, I remember the man I married who was funny and smart. I have more nuggets of Tom-isms—small pieces of advice that he would offer that were genially useful in maturing during my path here on Planet Earth. I also have memories of his sadness, his feeling that he was never enough. He passed some of that on to his girls who seem to question themselves more often than they should in my mind. They both have a lot of him in them, but I believe Cristina and Jourdan got the best of their dad.

As for me, I loved Tom—maybe too much. For most of our romantic relationship, he wasn’t ready the kind of love I felt for him, and by the time he understood it, after several flirtations with affairs and one that developed enough that I gave him an ultimatum that it was either her or me and Jourdan, Tom committed to our marriage. By that time I was done. I was still so young and I wanted to experience the world. I wanted to go back to school. I wanted to travel. I wanted to do the things that a 27 year old does.

What I remember about Tom is the laughter, the friendship. This Christmas Jourdan and I have pretended that the holiday didn’t exist. No tree. No presents. No turkey. Both of us felt that it just wouldn’t feel right celebrating her father’s favorite holiday this year. Tom loved to buy gifts for his girls. For many years, even after our divorce, Tom did Christmas morning breakfast at his house. Jourdan and I would open our gifts to one another, and then pack up with her dad’s presents and head over to his house. We can smell the coffee brewing from the street and hear Christmas music blasting from his stereo from one of the local radio stations. He would have orange juice poured, and wine glasses—their only use in truth since Tom had been sober for many years by then—filled with strawberry yogurt. We would eat pastries and open presents. Sometimes Cristina came, or my mother. He was thrilled on those Christmas mornings to have his home filled with love. He felt validated somehow on those mornings…like he was normal—something that was so important to our Tom. Having been born into a Mexican Pentecostal family in South Chula Vista, California, he had struggled with the idea that somehow he didn’t fit in the world for most of his life. But on Christmas mornings, he was just Tom. Generous, funny, dancing Tom.

On the day Tom died his nurse had opened a window. The nurse said that Tom looked out the window with those expressive eyes, and he was gone. I liked to envision that window freeing Tom’s soul. I like to think of him looking down on that body that no longer supported him, and finding new feet to run, to dance, to celebrate. I like to think of him looking at his daughter Cristina and the kind of mother she is to her son, and being proud. I like to think of him sitting in AA meetings listening as Jourdan speaks, hearing her mention him often, and laughing at how funny our little girl is.

And so, this Christmas there is no tree. There is only the realization that it’s Planet Earth’s first year in more than 60 without a Tom Lopez.

Here’s to you, Tom Lopez…